Posts Tagged With: ADD

This week the EdFive takes a long look at ADD and the use of Ritalin. L Alan Sroufe, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, touched off a lively exchange last week with his stance that Ritalin’s “gone wrong” in the NYT Sunday Review…{EF}

THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled? In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

Regarding the opinion piece “Ritalin Gone Wrong” written by Alan Sroufe, Ph.D., (NY Times, Jan. 29, 2012): As is usually the case when the use of stimulant medications like Ritalin makes it into mainstream media, the piece pushed emotional hot-buttons in a way that would scare the daylights out of uninformed readers and lead them to avoid ever using such medications or allowing their children to, thereby giving up on a class of medications with enormous potential benefits.

Let me offer a different point of view. I’m an M.D., a child and adult psychiatrist who’s been treating children who have what we now call ADHD for over 30 years….

Perhaps the most easily drawn conclusion about L. Alan Sroufe, who wrote Ritalin Gone Wrong for the Jan. 29 Week in Review, is that he does not have a child who suffers from what he calls “problems in focusing” — or what most call attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — and who has benefited from Ritalin or one of the many other drug therapies available.

Nor do I….

…But by the time I reached the final paragraph, Dr. Sroufe’s harsh condemnation of the people who turn to drug therapies in the hope of helping their children had thoroughly alienated me — along with, I presume, many parents he might have hoped to reach with his message.

Just when you thought the debate couldn’t get any stickier, here’s another layer from Heidi Mitchell that will make you shake your head. Who’d have thought that meds and entrance to Harvard would be in the same sentence? {EF}

Steven decided to dupe his doctor when he returned from his elite boarding school exhausted by the intense competition there. He needed an edge to help him, he felt. So through written evaluations from teachers and his parents, and by deliberately failing tests, he succeeded in getting himself diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and was given both his in-school tests and his SATs untimed. Eventually Steven, which is not his real name, was accepted to a top college in upstate New York, although he no longer takes medication, nor does he consider himself ADHD. The ADHD diagnosis, and the benefits that came with it, he acknowledges, helped him beat the competition.

[This is a repost from November; particularly relevant to this week’s ADD focus] Is ADHD a myth? Why does it occur more on the east coast? And how can animation spice up a lecture? [EF]

In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools’ dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.